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D-Vision

When it comes to encoding video on the Mac, you have lots of options. You can spend as much or as little as you want. Since we don’t all have hundreds of dollars to spend on video applications, there is a nice selection of cheap video tools out there. One of the ones I’ve recently started using is D-Vision. Not only can D-Vision encode ripped DVDs to various multimedia formats, it also includes a handful of useful tools for segmenting/joining/repairing AVI files, converting audio, joining VOB files (commonly found on DVDs), and extracting DVD subtitles. I’ve found D-Vision to be an easy one-step application for backing up my DVDs onto my Xbox, making for quick access while maintaining high quality audio and video.

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7 thoughts on “D-Vision”

Sweet :) Thanks for introducing me to this. I’ve used handbrake (unfortunately D-Vision can’t pause ripping, a feature I liked a lot in handbrake) and found it too limiting for my needs. I’m now a D-Vision convert :). Any idea what mac software I can use to convert *.sub/idx to srt? I kind of like text files as subtitles.

I’ve used handbrake (unfortunately D-Vision can’t pause ripping, a feature I liked a lot in handbrake) and found it too limiting for my needs. I’m now a D-Vision convert :)

I use Handbrake sometimes, too, but I find it hangs in near the end of a handful of DVDs. Handbrake 0.7.0-beta1 is out as of a few days ago. I have yet to try the new version on things that previously caused Handbrake to stop mid-encode.

Any idea what mac software I can use to convert *.sub/idx to srt?

From what I can gather, .sub/.idx files are encoded as bitmap images on the DVD inside the .vob files, and .srt is just a plain text file with timecodes and the text to be displayed in that duration. They’re stored like this as a bitmap, so converting them to plaintext is more than just a matter of juggling data inside a text file – you’re going to need a program to do some optical character recognition. Bonus points if anyone can guess what movie that subtitle image is from :-P

As for actually converting .sub/.idx files to .srt, ffmpegX claims to be able to export .srt files from a given .vob file, but when I tried it, results were less than impressive. It’s no good to me if I have to tell it every other word. There is a tool for Windows called SubRip, which you can grab here. It, too, asked me for characters, but it was much much nicer to use than the Terminal-based utility that ffmpeg used. It asked for a few characters every couple sentences, and stored my reponses for later comparison. Check out SubRip in action. To do the conversion with SubRip, launch it and go to File->Open VOB(s), click Open IFO, and choose your .idx file (which requires the matching .sub to be in the same folder), and hit Start.

Hey, D-Vision does allow you to pause rips. I just wasn’t sure what those icons were :) Being a frech software, it does confuse me with what target and destination means but I got the hang of it. I’m a SubRip fan, but I didn’t know that SubRip can actually open idx files. Thanks for the pointer.

Reason why I like srt is that rendered fonts are much nicer than bitmaps that are designed for TV.

Trying it now :) I hope the subtitles are not “Burned in” to the final avi, I liked them as idx/sub. I just have to wait and see (doing this on an iBook is slow). For now I still think that handbrake is slower than D-Vision.

Fixed AC-3 pass-through with multiple languages
Fixed issues with a few specific DVDs
Fixed audio glitches that happened sometimes
People can now disable the Check for updates on launch
Fixed a mem leak